Up until the last couple of months, I have treated LLMs as a supercharged stackoverflow. I would ask it questions on how to do something in a general sense, and then adapt the answer to my use case.

Now, my entire programming flow does not even include an editor. The tools I use are: pi.dev to write and implement openspec specifications, herdr to manage many pi instances, and ollama to run qwen 3.8 27b on my single 7900 XTX.

Writing good specifications is the key detail here. I will often iterate on a spec for hours until I am happy with it all of the details. Once I am happy with the spec, I can be quite confident that when I tell pi to apply the spec, the changes that I want will be done, and done how I want them, when I come back to check when it reports itself as done.

The landscale is fundamentally different from what it was. Feel free to ignore it, but you can absolutely generate high quality code if you know what you're doing.

N=1 and might be a raw skill issue on my end.

But I all but stopped writing code 13 months ago. At the beginning the code was often bad.

In the last 6 months alone I had received more praise from my customers for excellent work than ever before.